Z: Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. And yeah...L might come through this in one piece. Might ;)
PianoCatRulez: Thanks XD Well, I do have one novel available that was published when I was younger, and several more in the pipeline. Details are on my profile page if you're really interested ;)
AUGUST 7
"Do I want to know who gave you that passport?" Soichiro asked.
"Given your line of work, Yagami, I'm sure you'd love to," Mello answered as he pushed past the deputy director to claim the window seat and snapped his seatbelt shut across his waist. "However, given my line of work and my desire not to end up dead, I've no intention of telling you. Check your phone."
The sudden order caught Soichiro off guard and he fumbled his phone out of his pocket before he had time to think about it. He'd got as far as opening it when he remembered where he was and shook his head.
"I can't. Not on a plane."
"We're still on the ground," Mello pointed out, "and since we're in business class, they still have to get everyone else on the plane and then bore us rigid with the same flight speeches we've all heard countless times before. That gives us about twenty minutes. I don't suppose anyone will have contacted you, but if they have, then this is the last chance you'll have to give them orders for the next ten hours."
There was no arguing with this, although Soichiro still cast a wary look over his shoulder for any stewardess who might be poised to swoop down on him, then turned his phone on.
He had fifteen missed calls, fourteen of them from Aizawa, and felt dread slowly start to creep over him. If something had happened in Japan, something which required his attention, he'd have no choice but to fly back there, and then what would happen to L? Oh, Mello would hunt for him, but levels of genius aside, there were only so many doors that a fourteen year old kid could reasonably open. Adults tended to respond much more favorably to other adults.
No. No, that couldn't be it. If there was something wrong, those calls would have come from Tatenaka, not Aizawa. This had to be something different, something unrelated to the NPA.
"Who's Aizawa?" Mello asked, craning his neck to peer over Soichiro's shoulder.
Soichiro glanced at him.
"Someone who works for me," he answered. He didn't want to go into too much detail about the task force with Mello, not because he didn't trust him but because the fewer people who knew about – or even deduced – Light's involvement, the happier Soichiro would be. Scrolling down through the messages, he selected the first one and pressed Play.
He never heard all of it, nor did he hear any of the others, because the first thing Aizawa said was enough to drive any other thoughts clean out of the deputy director's head.
"Yagami-bucho, it's Aizawa. I've heard from Ryuzaki."
Without hesitation, the deputy director stopped the message, hit the callback button and brought the phone up to his ear. It rang. And rang.
Come on, pick up. Soichiro checked his watch. Two forty five. He wasn't sure what the time difference was between Japan and Fiji, but it couldn't be that much.
"Aizawa."
"When?" Soichiro demanded. "What did he say? Is he alright?"
Aizawa, thank every god in the universal pantheon, didn't hesitate or even ask Soichiro why it had taken so long to get back to him, but just said, "He's alive. He's injured, but I couldn't get any details out of him; whoever kidnapped him was standing right next to him, so I couldn't get a name. Ryuzaki said he was with an old friend from his hometown."
"No, I know who has him," Soichiro answered. "At least, I know a little. His alias is Hideaki Sato, although I've no idea what his real name is."
"Sato?" Aizawa echoed. "That guy Matsuda arrested in June?"
"Yeah, see what you can find out about him. What else did Ryuzaki say?"
Aizawa sighed. "It's hard to be sure, since he had to be careful what he told me. But I'm fairly certain he's in a house which is somewhere out in the country."
"How certain?" Soichiro insisted.
"The exact words he used were quiet and peaceful and you wouldn't use them to describe a town or city. You might use them to describe a village, I suppose, but...well, I don't know anything about English villages, but if they're anything like Japanese ones, newcomers would stand out like a sore thumb. It's the last place a kidnapper would want to be seen. A house in the middle of nowhere seems much more likely, especially since it would mean there's nowhere Ryuzaki can go for help and no one he can signal to. He also said the house had heavy duty locks on the doors and bars on the windows and that although he was in danger, escaping under his own steam was impossible. I don't think he dared say anything more specific, although knowing him, he's probably managed to work out where he is by now."
Probably. Sato couldn't hope to outwit L for long, in Soichiro's opinion, and if the man had let him out to make a phone call then L would have had a chance to look around, unless—no. No, Sato wouldn't have brought the phone to L; even in his injured state, the young man was far too dangerous an opponent. He'd want to keep a healthy distance between them.
"Why would he contact you of all people, though?"
"Believe me, Yagami-bucho, your guess is as good as mine," Aizawa answered. "I would imagine he was forbidden to call you though, just in case you and he had worked out some kind of code beforehand."
That would be a damn good idea, in Soichiro's opinion, but impractical. Sato must know that the deputy director would never have allowed L to just walk into his home, although the paranoid part of that hypothesis fitted in exactly with what Soichiro had learned about Wammy's House so far.
"So Sato told him to call someone. Did Ryuzaki give you any kind of message to pass on to me?"
"Yeah, that's why he phoned. Hang on, I wrote it down. It didn't mean anything to me, but you'll probably have better luck." There was a brief silence followed by a rustle of paper, then Aizawa came back on the line. "Alright. This is it, word for word, or as near as I could get it. Tell Soichiro to stop looking for me and if he argues, tell him I'm fine, no need to worry about me. Tell him I'm sorry I won't be there for the trip he planned for next March, the one that goes from Ishikawa to visit his parents, then Shizuoka to get me strawberries and then up to Aomori to visit the oldest hill in Japan. He said he remembered the oldest hill one especially since he was worried Aomori might still be snowed under in March. There's not much else in the message, only Thank Soichiro for considering me and tell him I'm very sorry he won't get to show me that hill." Aizawa hesitated, then went on. "At the end of the call, he also said – and I quote – Tell Soichiro to get me out of here before..."
"Before what?" Soichiro demanded.
"I don't know, Yagami-bucho. The phone went dead at that point before he could finish."
"I see. Hold on a moment." The deputy director scrabbled in his pockets for a scrap of paper and finally came up with the back of an envelope and a pen. "Give me that again slowly."
Pretending not to see the stewardess attempting to get his attention, he wrote down as much as he could as Aizawa repeated it, then ended the call as quickly as he could with an apologetic nod.
"Problems?" Mello inquired in a voice dripping with fake sympathy.
"Not yet. A friend of mine just heard from Ryuzaki." Soichiro passed Mello the notes he'd scribbled down from Aizawa's account. "But why would Sato let him call someone? Wouldn't it be in his best interests to keep Ryuzaki locked away with no contact? And Mello, please don't suck your chocolate like that; it makes me feel ill watching you."
Mello laughed. "Then don't look!" Handing the notes back to Soichiro, he added, "And call your family before we take off."
"My—"
"You don't think Sato will take L's word for it, do you?" Mello interrupted. "He'll be in touch with your wife and daughter to confirm that you really did invite him along on this little trip. Of course, he may have done that already and if that's so, then L's probably in a world of pain right now for deceiving him, but there may still be time. Tell them that if anyone phones and asks, yes, you planned to take L on a touring vacation around Japan. And make sure they list all the destinations he mentioned. You still have time before we take off if you do it quickly and don't stop to gossip with your wife."
There was nothing else for it. Soichiro waited until the stewardess was looking the other way, then took out his phone again and dialed his home number. What was the time now in Japan? Would anyone even be there?
He heard a click on the other end and then his own voice came down the line at him.
"This is the Yagami residence. I'm sorry we're all out right now. Please leave a message and we'll call you back as soon as we can."
God, did his voice really sound like that? Aware of the stewardess making a beeline back toward them, this time with murder in her eyes, Soichiro cleared his throat and spoke rapidly into the phone.
"Sachiko, it's me. I need you to do something. I don't have time to explain, but it's vital: if anyone calls up and asks about a trip I was planning, tell them we – that's you, me, Sayu and Ryuzaki – were going to go to Ishikawa and Shizuoka, and then up to Aomori to the oldest hill in Japan." Soichiro paused, guilt washing over him. He'd always done his utmost to keep his family out of his business and up until now, he'd succeeded. "I'm sorry. I'll explain everything to you and Sayu when I get back to Japan."
He ended the call, turned off his phone and put it back in his pocket, then turned to face Mello. "Getting back to my original question, why would Sato order Ryuzaki to make a phone call?"
Mello sighed. "Oh, fine. If you really can't figure it out, I'll break it down for you. Sato still has some kind of access to Wammy's network. He knows Near will be looking for L. He also knows you came to me and that Near insists on competing with me in everything."
The competition seemed to be more on Mello's side than Near's, but Soichiro wasn't stupid enough to point this out. The last thing he needed just then was for Mello to start ranting about Near.
"So, if L phones someone and that someone gets a message to you, Near and I will know exactly what's been said. Sato couldn't risk letting him call you directly, but he needed a message from L to go to you and so he ordered L to have it delivered via a third party. He's hoping Near and I will focus more on stopping the other than on actually finding him."
If what he'd seen on Kanacea had been anything to go by, the deputy director thought grimly that Sato might be onto something there.
"How would Near know what Ryuzaki said?" he asked.
"Priority one surveillance, Yagami. Your phone's been tapped, remember? Near knows L's message to you and right now you can bet he's already started researching it." Mello dug around in his bag for a few seconds before pulling out a black notebook and opening it. Off Soichiro's look, he said, "I find it helps to write things down sometimes and it's going to be a long flight to LA, and then again to London. Near has access to Wammy's, but he also has plenty of other demands on his time, which means we're more or less even in the race at this point. So, did you tell L you were going to take him on some nauseatingly sweet family trip for some magical bonding time?"
Soichiro folded his arms. Mello's constantly mocking tone was beginning to grate on him.
"I don't remember using the words nauseatingly sweet, but yes. I did suggest that."
Mello nodded. "So what did L say?"
The deputy director looked away as he remembered that time. The endless beeping of the machines, L's lifeless body..."Not a lot. He was in a coma at the time. I wasn't even sure if he could hear me or if he could, how much."
"Ah. So was there anything in L's message that sounded a little strange to you?"
Soichiro shook his head, fighting to focus around the ever growing desire for sleep. "I...yes. I never mentioned any kind of hill to him."
"Alright, then what did you say?" Mello demanded. "Because L's obviously picked it out as some kind of message to you, so there must be something in it we could use to work out where he is."
"I..." The deputy director cast his mind back to those nightmarish days spent by L's side, never knowing if he was going to wake up or if he was even still in there somewhere. "I talked about going to Ishikawa prefecture and then on to Shizuoka prefecture, to one or two of the strawberry farms."
Mello raised his eyebrows. "Ishikawa isn't exactly on the way to Shizuoka, especially not from Tokyo."
"I didn't say it was a day trip. And I talked about going to Aomori for L to try and track down his family, if he wanted to."
Mello nodded. "In other words, that part was just a way for him to tell you about the hill. The oldest hill in Japan." He leaned back in his seat, slurping on one of his chocolate bars. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
That was a damn good question. Soichiro took Mello's notebook and tore a page out of it – Mello wasn't the only one who found it easier to work things out by writing them down – and scrawled the word hill on it in kanji, hiragana, katakana, romaji and, after a brief translation and spelling lesson from Mello, English. It couldn't be the same method L had used before; Sato must have worked that out by now.
Terrific. Another damn clue that he probably thinks is so simple. It wasn't much consolation that Mello didn't seem to know what it meant either.
"Mello, do Wammy's kids use metaphors in coded messages? Or slightly different meanings?"
The boy caught on immediately. "If the word hill could be substituted for mountain, say?"
"That sort of thing, yes."
"He might, but why? There are plenty of mountains in Japan and in Aomori, so L could have used the word without arousing Sato's suspicion." Mello sucked at his chocolate for a while, the sound making Soichiro feel more and more nauseous, then he shook his head. "No. The important part of the message has to be hill, and the fact that he mentioned it being in Aomori also has something to do with where he is right now. I'll have a look for any likely hills there once we land and I can use the internet again."
Soichiro stared at L's message with a sinking feeling of deja vu. Matt had solved the last clue in a few seconds, but this one looked like it was going to be a little more problematic. Unless...no, surely L wouldn't have used the same technique twice. Especially not with a verbal message, which could end up garbled and reworded in the translation. The deputy director made a note to check any known hills and/or mountains in Aomori – it would be just like L to spell out his location with the first syllable of each one – but beyond that, there wasn't a great deal he could do.
Unless...Soichiro hesitated. Unless Aomori was just another way of throwing Sato off the trail. He was sure the man wouldn't have taken L to Japan, so maybe...
"What's the oldest hill in England?" he asked suddenly.
"How the hell should I know?" Mello answered. "But it doesn't matter. L would never have given you that blatant a clue, partly because Sato would pick up on it and move him and partly, of course, because Sato would beat the shit out of him if he tried it."
Soichiro turned in his seat to look at the boy more fully. "Ryuzaki isn't a coward."
"Neither are you," Mello pointed out, "but when I had my gun to your head, you did exactly as you were told. I imagine L's already learned firsthand what happens when you defy Sato."
Soichiro felt his heart start to crawl downwards.
"Are you saying he's likely to torture Ryuzaki?" he asked. Part of him was afraid of the answer, but – and here he forced himself to look at the matter in a practical light – if L was going to be too weak or badly hurt to move, they would have to factor that into any rescue attempt.
Mello thought about this for a long time.
"To tell you the truth, I got out of Wammy's before they could assign me to Sato permanently, so I've never had to deal with him as a handler, but I don't think so. I mean, if he came back in a bad mood it wouldn't take much to set him off, but so long as L does what he's told when he's told to do it and doesn't attempt to rebel or escape, Sato won't hurt him."
"Even though he destroyed half of your face?" Soichiro asked, and then kicked himself hard for not finding a more tactful way of asking the question. Maybe something of L had rubbed off on him during the time they'd spent together.
Mello reached up and caressed his scars. He was wearing a baseball cap with the brim pulled down over that side and had pulled his hair forward to hide the worst of them.
"I did run away," he reminded Soichiro. "It was a way to dissuade me from trying the same thing again."
The matter of fact tone was a little too reminiscent of L for Soichiro's liking, and he though that even if Mello had escaped in the end, Wammy's House had succeeded in at least partly conditioning him first.
"Not many people use a blowtorch as a means of dissuasion," he pointed out, lowering his voice as the stewardess began to go through the pre-flight safety briefing.
The boy looked away, lips tight. "I don't talk about it, Yagami."
"Alright, but is it possible that Sato will do the same thing to Ryuzaki?"
Mello shrugged. "No idea. He may try, though he needed help to do it to me. My face was burned very carefully, in case you hadn't noticed. No damage to my eye, nose or mouth, only the skin."
And to do that, Soichiro was well aware that Mello would have had to be rendered completely immobile. No kid, no matter how conditioned into the role of intelligent slave, would sit there meekly while half their face was burned off.
Next to him, Mello leaned back in his seat, staring out of the window as the plane began to taxi along the runway, then he added, "Though it's likely he roughed L up a bit at the beginning in order to establish who was in charge." Turning his head to face Soichiro, he went on. "Now, I've answered a lot of your questions, Yagami. It's time you answer some of mine."
"You mean you haven't worked out the answers yourself?" Soichiro inquired sarcastically. "Someone as intelligent as you?"
"I'm a genius, not a mind reader," Mello retorted. "Question one. What's L to you? Or no, let me be a little more specific: once you find him, what are you going to do with him?"
Soichiro shrugged. "Take him back to the hotel and from there back to Japan so he can return to his normal life."
"You mean buying food, paying rent and bills, looking for a stable job? That's not normal, Yagami. Not to L. What are you going to do if he tells you he'd rather continue working for Wammy's, albeit under more favorable conditions?"
The deputy director took a deep breath. "L was always very emphatic about not wanting to go back."
A slow smile spread across Mello's face. "Yes, I imagine he was. And in your opinion, was his emphatic refusal coming from someone who meant what they said? Or was he trying to convince himself? No matter how good your intentions are, no matter how much L might chafe at being a field agent, he was conditioned and brainwashed to it for his entire life. Don't think it stopped the second he started working with Watari, because it wouldn't have. You can't just toss that level of indoctrination aside like an old tin can, Yagami."
"He turned against Watari after Kyoto, and-"
"What happened in Kyoto?" Mello interrupted, eyes alight with interest.
Soichiro shook his head. "L told me in the strictest confidence. I'm not going to betray his trust." Especially not after what I went through to earn it, he added to himself.
"Alright," Mello said unexpectedly. "I can respect that. But it's still there. Sato may not be working for Wammy's, but he knows their tricks. Like I said before, you have to consider the possibility that he might succeed in retraining L, at least partially."
The deputy director looked away, lips tight.
"No," he said at last. "I don't have to consider that possibility, because it's never going to happen. I know him, Mello, probably a lot better than you do since he's been living with me for the last couple of months. Trust me. He'll want out."
Mello shrugged. "Well, I can't make you believe me, even if I know far more about Wammy's House than you. There are times when I wonder if it wouldn't be better just to give in and go back, and I wasn't there for that long. Still, neither of us will know for sure until we beat Near. Question two. If you know L as well as you claim, you should be able to tell me this: why is he just sitting around waiting for you? Because he can't have known you would come to me, or that you would succeed in finding me, or that I would agree to help you. Why the hell doesn't he just kill Sato? The guy would have made sure there was no one else around who L could go to for help; well, that works both ways. If L were to kill him, there would be no witnesses and he's capable of cleaning up any evidence. That would enable him to get some supplies together and either call to tell you where he is and let you pick him up, or escape at his leisure. "
It was several seconds before Soichiro trusted his voice enough to speak. Mello's casual, matter-of-fact tone as he spoke about murdering another human being – even one like Sato – was somehow more chilling than anything he'd said so far.
"How would you suggest he do it?"
Mello leaned back, pressing his fingers together at the tips and looking for all the world as if Soichiro had simply presented him with a rather intriguing math problem.
"Well, Sato looks after himself in terms of diet and exercise, so he's very athletic. Strength for strength, something like strangling him would probably be too dangerous. L's taller than I am, of course, and certainly taller than Sato, and stronger than he looks. However, he's also injured, which might be why he hasn't acted before now. Of course, he could still strangle him, but only if he caught him by surprise and only if he could be one hundred percent sure that Sato couldn't get free. I'm not sure what kind of punishment he'd face for attempting to take out his handler, but whatever he does try, he can't hope to try twice. Stabbing someone is much harder than it looks unless you know exactly where to insert the knife. L would, of course – we're taught several ways of killing people, both to make us more efficient detectives and to enable us to protect ourselves if our handler dies – but taking Sato by surprise is going to be impossible, especially with a knife in his hand." Mello shook his head. "Which means that we can rule out any direct attempts. I would suggest poison in his food, but Sato practically lives on salad and fish and the flavors aren't strong enough to hide the taste of weedkiller. If he ate donuts, you could mix arsenic with powdered sugar, but you wouldn't be able to give him enough to kill him with a single dose using that method and you couldn't hope to keep doing it every day."
"I seem to remember reading about something like that in a book," Soichiro commented.
"Yeah, that's where I got the idea," Mello answered frankly, "but like I say, it's impractical. No, all things considered, the most effective method would be for L to knock Sato out and then get a knife and slash his throat before he regained consciousness."
"He won't," Soichiro stated.
The other scrutinized him for a few moments. The deputy director got the feeling that there were a lot of wheels turning behind those cold eyes.
"Alright," Mello said at last, "but why?"
"Because Ryuzaki isn't a violent person, much less a murderer."
"This isn't murder," Mello pointed out. "This is Sato we're talking about, and that would make it justifiable homicide."
"You're not in any kind of legal position to make that judgment, Mello."
The look he got in return chilled even Soichiro. For a few seconds Mello didn't say or do anything, just stared at him.
"Yagami," he said at last in a very quiet voice, "if you think for one second I'm going to let him go, you're living in a fucking dream world. I'll help you find L, but at the end of it all, Sato's mine. I've got plans for him." The emphasis he put on the word plans made Soichiro think that whatever those plans were, they weren't likely to be of the surprise party variety.
"You really hate him, don't you?"
Mello let out a short laugh, fingering his scar. "Can you blame me? He isn't working for Wammy's anymore either, so there won't be any repercussions from them. In fact, I think that old idiot Roger might even give me a medal, if he could find me."
Soichiro was silent, the boy's words sparking off an ugly train of thought in his mind. He didn't think Roger was any serious threat by himself – certainly if the old man did somehow manage to find L, he would never hurt him – but he was still head of Wammy's House, which was shrouded in so much secrecy that almost no one knew of its existence, let alone the number of field agents that had passed through its doors. Near was dangerous enough, but if there were others out there, there was no way he and Mello could deal with a mini-army of Wammy's kids.
Soichiro glanced at Mello, who was now sipping at a can of Coke. The deputy director didn't think any traces of his own thoughts were visible, but he must have frowned or something because Mello set his drink back down and said, "Now what? Are you after another look at my face? Because if you are, all you have to do is say. Don't feel awkward; it can take some people three or four looks to really get used to it."
"It's not that. I was just thinking about what you said about Wammy's. I know Near's against us but does Roger have any other field agents he can call on?"
"Lots," Mello answered, "but none that could be considered capable of going up against me. Besides, I think Roger might consider L to be more trouble than he's worth right now. So far his attempts to recapture him have led to the loss of two agents in training, the reassignment of his best pet Near and loss of his earnings, open warfare from two rogue ex-agents in training – in other words, me and Matt – and the enmity of the Japanese NPA. He may just decide to step back and let us fight it out amongst ourselves. You can bet Near has told him of our little game."
Soichiro was silent for a few moments as his sense of expediency warred with his morals and finally won.
"Do you think Near will honor the rules of this...game?" he asked.
"No," Mello answered, "but that's alright, since I don't intend to either. I'm going to call in a few favors when we land. Matt owes me, and he can set up protection for your phone faster than I can, which means Near's team won't be able to intercept messages anymore. I'm not saying that little maggot won't manage to wriggle through in the end, but it'll buy us some time. Matt can hack into the security cameras at Wammy's, if he hasn't already, and as soon as you and I get back to London, we're going underground."
Soichiro glanced at Mello. "You mean in the sense of disappearing from the public view?"
"No, I mean in the quite literal sense, although your definition works too." Mello paused in the middle of unwrapping his headphones and glanced at the deputy director. "By the way, do you have any sores or open wounds that really shouldn't come into contact with human shit?"
"What? No! Why?"
"Oh, no reason," Mello said in an innocent tone that Soichiro didn't trust for one second. "Just making conversation."
Turning away, he plugged his headphones into the armrest and dialed through the in flight options until he found one he liked the look of – Soichiro wasn't surprised to see that it was a horror movie – and didn't speak again for the rest of the flight.